Making Time

"Time flies. It's up to you to be the navigator" - Robert Orben

##Time Management

I'm sure we all want to make better use of our time, since everybody seems to be so busy these days. So much to do because we can do it; so much to be interested in because attractions, events, experiences we can be interested in are all around us to a degree unprecedented in human history. If not in my entire lifetime.

Here are two helpful ways of managing time that I use that you may not be as familiar with as more conventional methods.

"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." - Anthony Oettinger

##Pay Attention!

You probably already know how important it is for us to manage our time. I know I've been reminded often enough that it's a finite resource, that time marches on, time and tide wait for no man, time we've spent we can't get back again, etc etc.

That everybody has 168 hours in each week in which to do something useful.

There are different and varied methods we can use to manage our time.

Another way of looking at it is that we can exert more control over our activities or increase our productivity by managing our attention.

Attention is a resource available to all of us. In our every waking moment, we are constantly utilizing our attention. We're always attending to something.

How we direct our attention and how we maintain our attention in order to focus our energy can often make a great difference to not only whether or not we achieve what we set out to achieve but also to how efficient we are in our efforts.

In our modern times, there are so many opportunities for our attention to be pulled in many directions at once, especially if we have any kind of online life.

Why do we so often run out of time before getting those things done that we say are important to us? It’s because we allow our attention to be diverted. We become distracted from the task in hand.

The problem is not time, and it’s not our 'to do' list. We usually know how much time we have when we decide what we want to do with it. The problem is that our attention often fails to stay on track until we've arrived at our destination, until we achieve what we set out to achieve.

“Genius is nothing but continued attention” - Claude-Adrien Helvétius

##The Reticular Activating System

The Reticular Activating System (RAS) is, to put it as simply as possible, that part of our brain that controls what we pay attention to. What we pay attention to is determined by what our brain perceives as important.

Some of this is 'hardwired' - for example, it's important to our survival that we are made aware of threats or potential threats in our immediate environment. Most of what we perceive as important to us as individuals, however, emanates from our personal experiences.

Depending on who you read, in every given moment our brain takes in anything from 11,000 to 11,000,000 bits of information. Roughly (I don't think anybody has ever actually counted). If we had to consciously respond to that quantity of data we would be overwhelmed and would very quickly go completely nuts.

Our RAS acts like a filter so that we are able to pick and choose at a subconscious level the information we attend to and thus only notice what's important to us.

There is a sense in which this is like having radar.

You've probably heard the story of the woman who becomes pregnant and who subsequently becomes acutely aware that all of a sudden the world seems to be full of pregnant women. Or the man who decides to buy a new car of a certain make and model and subsequently notices that make and model of car everywhere he goes.

We can use this phenomenon to our advantage to improve our efficiency and effectiveness in completing tasks on our 'to do' list.

The first step in managing our attention is to prioritize.

Just as an aside (and I appreciate this may seem pedantic to some): I often see references to setting "priorities". Plural. The word 'priority' means literally 'that which goes first'. There is only one priority by definition. That which goes first.

When we know exactly what the thing is that we must do next, we can more easily avoid being sidetracked by activities that may be fun or convenient but which don't move us toward our desired outcome.

What is the best use of my time right now?

If I can only accomplish one thing right now, what should that one thing be?

When we've done that one thing, what is the one thing that's next?

When we know exactly what it is we want to accomplish and focus on our objective, we no longer need to try to pay attention to every bit of information coming from all the stimuli in our world. Our Reticular Activating System, our onboard radar, so to speak, will know our target and that will be how we move toward it.

Our time and energy are precious resources. We can support our ability to focus on the task in front of us by knowing when to say "no" and being willing to say "no".

This means not only saying "no" to other people who would suck up our time and energy without benefit to us or the accomplishment of our desired outcome; it means saying 'no' to ourselves whenever we're tempted to do anything that would likewise not move us toward our desired outcome.

At the end of the day, saying "yes" to one thing always means saying "no" to something else and that's what maintaining clarity and focus requires much of the time

##Timebending!

When we were children, we learned, or were taught, how to "tell the time", by the position of hands on a clock face or by the numbers on a clock.

Are clocks and time the same thing? No.

"Time is an illusion" - Albert Einstein

###Here's how to slow down time (or speed it up if that's what you want).

Why does time seem to slow down when we’re young and speed up as we get older?

A popular theory is that it's because, when we're younger, each year comprises a larger percentage of our life span than when we're older. One year is, for example, 10% of our life so far when we're ten years old and only 2% of our life so far when we're fifty, a much smaller portion of the total time, which makes it seem as if a year passes more quickly.

There is, however, a neurological reason why our perception of time changes as we grow older.

This comes from the research of American neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman: you can read about it in greater depth at his website here

Time we measure by a clock or similar device - so called "clock time” - can be broken into minutes, seconds, and nanoseconds, and can be objectively measured. We have internal clocks that often do an excellent job of tracking time. My wife's ability to accurately judge cooking times without consulting a clock or watch or using a timer, for example, has often been remarked upon!

Yet how we perceive time is not always so accurate. There are occasions and circumstances where time may be perceived as contracting or expanding, speeding up or slowing down. Dr. Eagleman calls this phenomenon "brain time" and unlike clock time its measurements are very subjective.

It seems that the perception of time in our brain is interwoven with our emotions and our memories and this means that what we think is happening is actually a story that our brain creates based on what information gets noticed and what information gets edited out.

Time then, so Dr. Eagleman argues, is ultimately “a construction of the brain.”

How does Dr. Eagleman's research apply to our lives?

Why does time seem to slow down when we’re young and speed up as we get older?

The answer is that when we're young everything is new. Our days are filled with novel experiences. We're constantly discovering, learning, and figuring out how the world works and regularly engaging in 'firsts' - first birthday, first day at school, and so on. Nearly everything is something we encounter for the first time. Because our brain needs to know all that there is to know about each novel experience, it records the information in a depth and richness of detail that causes a stretching out of our perception of time. The amount of detail we can recall gives the impression that the period of time was stuffed full of incident and this causes a perception that the time passed by very slowly.

When we're adults, life is much more "been there done that". We know the patterns and the routines and our lives have probably become far more predictable. Our brain doesn't have a reason to expend valuable energy on paying attention to repetitious experiences so they get edited out. The lack of detail we can recall in the period of time gives the impression that nothing much happened and this causes a perception that the time passed by very quickly.

The good news is that we can manipulate our perception of time to make our lives seem longer.

We have the power to slow down time (or so it will seem) by packing it with moments our brain will pay attention to and record in detail.

All we need to do to achieve this is to create more novelty in our lives.

We don't necessarily need to do this in big ways like travelling to foreign places, or learning to play a musical instrument, or going bungee jumping. We can do many small things in our daily lives to stretch out time through new experiences - moving the furniture around, changing our hairstyle, taking a different route to work. The sky's the limit really once we start thinking about possibilities.

Time to go (for now).

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